IBM Software

Four steps to better database

and application performance
Find and solve performance problems without adding costs
Four steps to better database and application performance

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Identify & Solve & Optimize
Introduction diagnose prevent for success Resources
Poor application and When it comes to Use collected data to Take advantage of tools Learn more about per-
database performance finding and diagnosing pinpoint fixes with and capabilities to formance management
puts your business at problems, remember far-ranging benefits— enhance business best practices.
risk. How can you three things: context, and respond performance.
become a proactive context, context. proactively.
problem solver?
Four steps to better database and application performance
Introduction
It starts with a call from the customer
service manager
Your company’s sales representatives are
not meeting their goals for average call
time. The reps say their main application
takes forever to retrieve customer transac-
tion histories. The problem goes from man-
ager to manager until it lands in your lap.
Your diagnosis: poor database and
application performance
You know the symptoms all too well: slug-
gish customer service due to application
slowdowns. Business users who can’t log
on because systems are unavailable.
Missed service-level agreements. It’s bad
enough that these symptoms affect confi-
dence in IT, but it doesn’t stop there.
1 Introduction 2 Identify & diagnose
Performance issues can put your
company’s revenue at risk “In complex environments it
Poor application and database performance
ultimately erode customer satisfaction, cus-
can be very difficult to find
tomer retention and sales revenue. Inside performance bottlenecks. It can
your company, decreased productivity can take several people with skills in
reduce competitiveness and impact the application servers, networking
bottom line. And as the company adds
server CPUs and disk storage systems to
and databases to analyze and
plug performance gaps, overall infrastruc- then fix the bottleneck.”
ture costs escalate. Your goal of “doing
more with less” begins to look like a distant —China Merchants Bank
dream.
This e-book will examine the performance
challenges you face today—and show how
using a best-practices, four-step perform-
ance management methodology can make
a big difference when you’re up against
these scenarios.
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Four steps to better database and application performance
Are you ready to manage performance?
It’s no surprise that performance issues
keep cropping up. As your company and
business grows, more people, partners and
applications need access to data; the
increase in demand and channels can
decrease performance for everyone.
Constantly changing patterns of data use
can slow down even the most finely tuned
database. At the same time, finding and
fixing problems is more difficult because
today’s complex environments and their
layered application stacks often obscure
the underlying issues. As a result, problem
isolation can take days and require many
people to gather disparate diagnostics.
Even relatively large IT groups may lack the
specialized technical skills to proactively
manage performance—and acquiring those
1 Introduction 2 Identify & diagnose
skills can be expensive. Faced with already
stressed IT budgets, organizations may fall
back on a reactive approach built on man-
ual processes, ad hoc tools and stopgap
solutions.
For example, organizations may end up
relying on DBAs to create manual or
scripted processes for isolating problems,
only to find that those methods can’t scale
when more servers are added. Without
a scalable solution, the pattern repeats
itself. Continual business and IT changes
mean performance optimization is never
complete.
3 Solve & prevent 4 Optimize for success
Take the four-step approach to
proactive performance management
A better approach doesn’t require high-
priced expertise, but provides simplified
management of both database and
application performance based on a best-
practices, problem-solving methodology
with four basic steps:
● Identify
● Diagnose
● Solve
● Prevent
This approach builds performance from
the ground up. Let’s take a closer look at
each of these steps and what’s unique
about them when it comes to performance
management.
5 Resources
Four steps to better database and application performance

Step one: Identify

One of the best ways to keep a small prob-
lem from becoming a big one is to find it
while it’s still small. By the time a business
user is aware of a performance issue, it’s
too late—some damage has already been
done. So, what does your early warning
system look like?
If you don’t know which technical key
performance indicators (KPIs) will indicate
your systems’ health and tell you about a
problem before it actually starts affecting
the business, just ask the people who have
their hands on the systems. DBAs will point
at things like long-running SQL queries,
buffer pool and I/O statistics, memory con-
sumption and locking conflicts. Developers
will watch for time-consuming data-access
operations and analyze the time an applica-
tion spends calculating and the time it
spends waiting for a database response.
Clearly establishing the most important
KPIs is the first step. Follow that up by
ensuring that you’re monitoring them
efficiently. Do you rely on the entire team
constantly making manual checks to catch
aberrations, or do you have a system in
place that sends alerts when problems
appear? Not everyone needs to see every
locking problem; creating a small group of
people who receive KPI alerts and report
problems will help keep the entire team
focused on the task at hand.

1 Introduction 2 Identify & diagnose 3 Solve & prevent 4 Optimize for success 5 Resources
Four steps to better database and application performance

Step two: Diagnose

When a KPI indicates a performance prob-
lem, it’s tempting to immediately take a
microscope to the system that triggered the
alert. But in today’s IT infrastructures, few
systems stand alone, and effectively diag-
nosing the root cause of a problem requires
a holistic approach. Step back and analyze
the problem in a larger context: What’s
happening throughout the information
chain, from the database through the net-
work to the applications and back?
For example, let’s say that the customer
order history reporting application
exceeded the set response-time threshold.
By drilling down to average and maximum
end-to-end response times, you may
discover that the most time is being spent
in the data server. That information enables
you to drill down further, where you might
find an outdated SQL query. If you don’t
find one, further digging may reveal a need
to create indexes to bring order history
retrieval performance back in line.
Also, don’t unnecessarily limit your analysis.
Are there other performance management
systems in other parts of the enterprise?
Can you mine them for additional data?
Make sure you’re leveraging your invest-
ments in other solutions to get the full
picture.

1 Introduction 2 Identify & diagnose 3 Solve & prevent 4 Optimize for success 5 Resources
Four steps to better database and application performance

Step three: Solve

Broad horizons can help you find and
diagnose performance problems—but don’t
abandon them when it comes time to cre-
ate a solution. Your proactive alerting and
analysis capabilities should be capturing a
wealth of new data that can be applied to
problem solving.
In many cases, small changes at several
points in the IT infrastructure can be more
effective than a major overhaul that focuses
only on one system. For a slow query,
tuning up outdated SQL is almost always a
good idea, but don’t ignore the application
that’s creating the query. Is the function
necessary? Is this being handled
elsewhere? And are there truly enough
resources to handle the amount of data
that needs to be processed?
Think long term rather than stopgap. Use
your captured data to identify areas that—
when fixed—will affect more than just the
issue at hand, creating a system that’s
more robust at every turn.

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Four steps to better database and application performance

Step four: Prevent

Actively monitoring and collecting perform-
ance data should go beyond identifying and
solving problems—it can help you head
them off in the first place.
With a complete, accurate, easily-
searched-and-analyzed set of historical
data, you can educate your tech team.
For example, armed with the proper data,
you can explain where and when a spike in
memory use occurred and how it correlates
to a particular business event. You can also
show conclusively that it has leveled off and
document the changes you made to
resolve the problem for future reference.
Don’t stop with your technicians.
Communicate the event and your actions to
business stakeholders in a concrete way
with pie charts, not tech-speak. Giving
executives a concrete understanding of
performance issues and solutions will help
ensure that the right IT priorities are funded.
Finally, use the record of what you did
during the identification, diagnosis and
solving steps as a template to avoid similar
problems or solve them more quickly when
taking on your next project. Those reports
can also be used for auditing as it relates to
performance indicators of the database.

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 Four steps to better database and application performance
Become a performance-optimized organization
“Optim has sensible defaults that
give productive monitoring
straight out of the box. The end-
to-end monitoring capability
from a single point of control
saves costs and resources.”
—Venedim
1 Introduction 2 Identify & diagnose
Now that you have some guidelines to
follow, how do you make sure you have
the right technology in place?
IBM® InfoSphere™ Optim™ performance
management solutions deliver the tools and
capabilities you need at each step of the
process:
Identify
● Generate customized email alerts based
on thresholds
● Use web-based dashboards for visual
quick scanning
● Automatically monitor your applications
and network as well as the database
3 Solve & prevent 4 Optimize for success
Diagnose
●Dig into problem detail and related
context with drill-down screens
●Automatically analyze captured data to
pinpoint source code and determine root
cause
●Use built-in integration to leverage data
from other IBM solutions you may already
be using
Solve
●Receive expert advice for problem
resolution
●Correct the problem whether it’s in the
SQL, database or other related system
●Minimize slowdowns that impact user
productivity and revenue
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Four steps to better database and application performance

Prevent IBM InfoSphere Optim puts

●Capture and analyze data trends for
capacity planning and growth
●Easily generate and send reports to
business and IT leaders
●Enable cross-role collaboration—bring
DBAs and developers together
performance management in the
spotlight
IBM InfoSphere Optim solutions are
designed to deploy quickly and easily out
of the box for immediate benefit. Business-
value assessment services are also avail-
able to help you design a custom solution
complete with full financial analysis. Either
way, you can realize immediate ROI in
terms of cost and performance if you keep
performance-management best practices
in mind.

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Four steps to better database and application performance

Resources
To learn more about best practices for
database and application performance
management and IBM InfoSphere Optim
solutions, please contact your IBM repre-
sentative or check out these resources:

● Optimize Performance: Optimize

database application performance
pre- and post-production
● IBM Services
● IBM DB2

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010
IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
September 2010
All Rights Reserved
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